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Composer · Romantic

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

1840–1893 · Russian

Tchaikovsky was Russia’s first truly international composer and, in his own lifetime, one of the most beloved figures in European music. Born in 1840 in Votkinsk, he trained as a civil servant before turning to music in his early twenties, studying composition at the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory. He began teaching harmony at the newly opened Moscow Conservatory in 1866, and over the following twenty-five years produced six symphonies, three ballets (Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker), a string of operas, numerous concertos, and a wealth of chamber and song repertoire that has never left the international stage.

Tchaikovsky was a man of intense feeling, much of it conflicted. Homosexual in an unforgiving Russian society, often paralysed by depression and self-doubt, he poured the full weight of his emotional life into his music. He died in St. Petersburg in 1893, days after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony. The official cause was cholera, though the precise circumstances of his death have been debated ever since.

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London Symphony OrchestraRoyal Concertgebouw OrchestraWiener PhilharmonikerBerliner Philharmoniker

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Sources 2

  1. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Wikipedia Cited in Looking Back to Move Forward: Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven. Accessed 30 September 2026.
  2. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Encyclopaedia Britannica Cited in Looking Back to Move Forward: Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven. Accessed 30 September 2026.